Early
last century, industrial technology allowed business interests to produce
mass media at a cost that outclassed the capacity of non-corporate media
to compete. As a result, radical publishers were marginalized and media
diversity rapidly narrowed.

To counter claims
that society was being, in effect, brainwashed by this media monopoly,
corporate publishers promoted the idea of “professional journalism.” For
the first time, reporters would be trained in special “schools of
journalism” to master the arts of objective, balanced reporting. Big
business moguls would be in control but, as good democrats, they would see
to it that their journalists were scrupulously fair.

In reality, powerful
biases were built into this new media “professionalism” -- key among them
a presumption about who should be the primary source of news.

American media
analyst Robert McChesney explains that the new, professional press
“regarded anything done by official sources, for example, government
officials and prominent public figures, as the basis for legitimate news”.
(McChesney, in Kristina Borjesson ed.,
Into The Buzzsaw, Prometheus Books, 2002, p.367)

This reliance on
official sources naturally “gave those in political office (and to a
lesser extent, business) considerable power to set the news agenda by what
they spoke about and what they kept quiet about.”

Thus the
Telegraph’s environment editor, Charles Clover, wrote to a Media
Lens reader:

“I am a reporter. Reporters report what
other people say. Generally we report important, influential people, but
only when they say something new, because what important people say is of
most interest to others, and they are the ones who shape our world.”
(Email forwarded to Media Lens, September 8, 2005)

In the Times
(London), the then ITV News (now BBC) political editor, Nick Robinson,
wrote of the 2003 invasion of Iraq:

“It was my job to
report what those in power were doing or thinking... That is all someone
in my sort of job can do. We are not investigative reporters.” (Robinson,
“‘Remember the last time you shouted like that?’” I asked the spin
doctor,” The Times, July 16, 2004)

To the extent that a
media system accepts that its “professional” role is to report a news
agenda set by officialdom, it must largely renounce the task of
challenging that agenda. If the government, for example, rejects as
hopelessly flawed a report on civilian casualties in Iraq -- if it decides
to “move on,” say, from the November 2004 Lancet report -- who are
professional news journalists to disagree?

For a news
journalist to continue promoting the credibility of the officially
rejected report -- or the rejected role of oil in motivating foreign
policy, or the rejected possibility of Tony Blair’s prosecution for war
crimes -- is to challenge the accepted right of officialdom to set the
agenda for the professional press. It is in fact an attempt to set a
competing agenda. This is to lay oneself open to attack as a ‘biased’,
‘committed’ and ‘crusading’ journalist -- something professional news
reporters are not supposed to be.

If this sounds like
an exaggeration, consider this response from Ed Pilkington, foreign editor
of the Guardian:

“We are not in the
business of editorialising our news reports." (Pilkington to Media Lens,
November 15, 2002)

After all, if
professional news reporting is about covering the thoughts and actions of
officials -- the “important, influential people” -- then advancing our own
thoughts as journalists is, by definition, “unprofessional”. Just consider
how seriously this is taken.

When we asked the
BBC’s World Affairs correspondent, Paul Reynolds, if he thought
George Bush hoped to create a genuine democracy in Iraq, he replied:

“I cannot get into a
direct argument about his policies myself! Sorry.” (Email to Media Lens,
September 5, 2005)

Reynolds explained
to one of our readers:

“You are asking for my opinion about the war
in Iraq yet BBC correspondents are not allowed to have opinions!”
(Forwarded to Media Lens, October 22, 2005)

The point being that if journalists are not
even supposed to express personal opinion in reporting officialdom, then
they are certainly not supposed to express personal opinion by promoting a
news agenda against the wishes of officialdom.

It would, for
example, be professional suicide for a reporter to continue raising the
issue of the Lancet report, or the lure of oil in Iraq, in press
conference after press conference, or via news reports in the Guardian,
against the flow of the official news agenda. All it needs is for the
government, or an editor, to apply the label “crusading” and a journalist
can become “radioactive”. Thus we find that not one mainstream UK news
reporter has attempted to challenge government claims in response to the
Lancet report. In her book, Into The Buzzsaw, award-winning
former CNN producer and CBS reporter Kristina Borjesson, writes:

“The buzzsaw is a powerful system of
censorship in this country that is revealed to those reporting on
extremely sensitive stories, usually having to do with high-level
government and/or corporate malfeasance. It often has a fatal effect on
one's career. I don't want to mix metaphors here, but a journalist who has
been through the buzzsaw is usually described as ‘radioactive’, which is
another word for unemployable.” (Borjesson, op., cit, p.12)

In fact, some
“radioactive” journalists are tolerated by the media -- but they are tiny
in number. In reviewing Robert Fisk’s new book, The Great War For
Civilization, The Economist writes:

“Two decades ago, in a history of Lebanon's
civil war, he [Fisk] argued that the job of the journalist was to write a
first draft of history. Since then, he appears to have changed his mind.
In the preface of this book he endorses the view of an Israeli journalist,
Amira Hass, that the proper vocation of the reporter is to ‘monitor the
centres of power’.” (“Bigger problems -- The Middle East,” The
Economist, October 15, 2005)

Predictably Fisk is therefore attacked for
delivering “Old Testament rants against the wickedness of Israel and
America” and a “dogged, powerful and often infuriating polemic against the
West.” (Ibid)

“For over half a century Vidal has been a
factory of polemic and prose raging against Pax Americana.” (Carroll, “For
50 years he has been the scourge of the US -- and now he's at it again,”
The Guardian, December 6, 2001)

“Carlton's output...
has included the award-winning documentary Kelly and Her Sisters
[and] John Pilger's controversial polemic Palestine is Still the Issue.”
(Deans, “Hewlett quits Carlton,” The Guardian, January 8, 2004)

Roy Greenslade wrote in the Guardian of the
late Paul Foot: “He did not try to be objective or balanced. His polemics
were laced with sarcasm.” (Greenslade, “A fond farewell,” The Guardian,
July 26, 2004)

In the New York
Times, Frank Rich discussed Michael Moore's film Fahrenheit 9/11:

“Of course, Mr.
Moore is being selective in what he chooses to include in his movie; he's
a polemicist, not a journalist." (Rich, New York Times, May 23,
2004)

Interestingly, the charge of crusading,
polemical bias is generally reserved for critics of powerful
interests. Old Testament rants by journalists for the virtue of
Israel and America go unnoticed by the eagle-eyed guardians of
professional virtue.

No report was
ordered when Andrew Marr said of Blair on the BBC evening news of April 9,
2003:

“He said that they
would be able to take Baghdad without a bloodbath, and that in the end the
Iraqis would be celebrating. And on both of those points he has been
proved conclusively right. And it would be entirely ungracious, even for
his critics, not to acknowledge that tonight he stands as a larger man and
a stronger prime minister as a result.” (Marr, BBC 1, News At Ten,
April 9, 2003)

In reviewing his
book, My Trade, the Daily Telegraph noted that Marr “comes
across in this book as he does in newsprint and on television -- as lively
and human, with little side and no crippling prejudices.” (Nicholas
Blincoe, “Striving to find the human note,” Daily Telegraph,
September 25, 2004)

Or consider Matt
Frei’s comment from Washington for BBC TV News:

“There's no doubt
that the desire to bring good, to bring American values to the rest of the
world, and especially now to the Middle East... is now increasingly tied
up with military power.” (Frei, BBC1 Panorama, April 13, 2003)

Was this an Old
Testament rant? Apparently not.

Or consider this
from Frei speaking from the United States:

“The war with terror
may have moved from these shores to Iraq. But for how long?” (Frei, BBC
News At Ten, September 10, 2003)

Was this
scrupulously neutral, professional journalism?

In fact, both of these statements
communicated deeply controversial, personal opinions, but were not at all
criticized as biased or unprofessional. Imagine if Frei had said:

“There's no doubt
that the desire to exploit the Third World, to project US corporate power
in the world, and especially now in the Middle East... is now increasingly
tied up with military power.”

And: “The war for
control of Third World resources has moved to Iraq. But for how long?”

There is no doubt
that Frei would have been sacked. The reason? He would have breached the
BBC's hallowed code of professional ethics: “Thou Shalt Not Express
Personal Bias.”

This is how the most
important group of journalists -- news reporters -- is effectively
silenced by the concocted, power-friendly bias of “professional
journalism.”